I've never not claimed artillery isn't a force multiplier and the fact you've said that illustrates what I've been saying; artillery alone can not win the war, you need infantry taking ground in conjunction with it to do so. I'd also point that the Americans of 1944 had everything you outlined and then some, and were still stopped cold by German defenses in the same region from roughly September to October until March of 1945 despite years of experience at that point. Given the AEF did not enjoy anywhere near the advantages of the U.S. Army in late 1944, I think it should be telling what will happen.
The Americans in 1944 had nowhere near the level of heavy artillery that their 1918 equivalents enjoyed, severe logistical problems after their rush across France, and were at the tail-end of their offensive. A 1919 offensive by contrast has far more useful heavy artillery, will have resolved its logistic problems, and constitutes the focal point, rather than the trailing edge, of an American offensive. It will also be supported by attacks along the rest of the front, something that you have not responded to, since apparently you still continue to be of the opinion that the German Western border consists of a singular city of Metz and their Southern norder of a total of 3 passes through Austria...
No they are not and the exact specifications of your citation will reveal this as by late 1914 the French had gotten quite a bit of experience in August and September to say the least.
I would suggest you would re-read about fighting in August and September on the Western Front and how that differed from fighting in the winter, and you will see the ridiculousness of trying to say that the French tactical lessons they learned throughout the winter were in response to the earlier period of mobile warfare. Conversely, they were a reaction to an attempt to
return to their earlier mobile warfare and to react to the siege warfare conditions they found in late 1914, which were entirely unprecedented. I would also point out that
by late 1918 the Americans had gotten quite a bit of experience in August, September, October, and November to say the least.
Because no Army has ever gotten better by sitting around nor does fighting trench raids make you a master of the offense.
A ridiculous statement, armies get better sitting around quite often, as they absorb and evaluate lessons of combat experience. The French learned and applied a host of various lessons and ideas throughout the winter of 1914/15, without which they would have done far worse.
The Hundred Days certainly featured that as a whole, but not for the Americans largely. Their first large scale offensive wasn't achieved until September with St. Mihel, which is why Pershing fought so hard with Foch to get the operation as the Americans needed a baptism of fire to learn lessons. If you read the literature on it you realize they found there was many problems with their performance, in particular their logistics systems.
Of course, it was their first independent operation. What you're suggesting is that there will be no significant improvements in a half a year period, which is absurd.
New recruits combined with medical discharges were enough to sustain at least of the armies on the Western Front. The reason the other men had yet to be called up was that it would require replacing them with women in the factories, which was a rather touchy issue for the Prussian elite.
Or more likely, just as Tooze demonstrated for the WW2 economy, there were important structural factors which prevented the mobilization rate of German women in the war economy from being expanded, such as the mixed economy of Germany which required female labor in non-industrial aspects.
My argument has been that their direct participation will fade going into 1919 as they simply cannot afford to keep it up; the question of what the AEF can do is rather different from can the French continue to keep fighting. I also find the colonial issue interesting and propose the same question you outlined above; why weren't the French already doing that? The answer is quite obviously that recruiting and training hundreds of thousands of people you plan to continue to keep down after the war isn't the smartest of ideas.
The French
were doing huge colonial recruitment schemes by 1918 so you're
wrong or imposing a false narrative in that, the increase in colonial troops are not my hypothetical suggestions of what the French
could do to fix their manpower gap like your suggestion that the Germans will be able to form enough manpower to fight off the US/UK/France/Belgium/Italy/Yugoslavia/Greece/Romania/Portugal/Thailand(lol) by putting women in the factory, but their actual policy which had achieved huge successes by 1918.
A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa 1895-1930 discusses this at length, and that the French had managed to organize an effective recruitment campaign by 1918 after previous difficulties. This is in addition to the steadily increasing supplies of colonial raw materials which with the German submarine warfare having lost its forward bases in Flanders and becoming less effective, could be accessed more effectively thanks to the reduced bottleneck of Allied shipping.
Just like Patton managed to do with overwhelming artillery, massive armored units and overwhelming air superiority in late 1944? How about Devers?
Patton had reached the culmination point of his offensive and was faced with severe logistics problems, and ultimately the Americans did succeed in taking Metz and certainly not with the casualties that you claim would knock them out of the war. Which is after all, your argument: that the Americans will grind to a halt at Metz and this will lead to a compromise peace on what are effectively German victory terms.
A 1944 American offensive also enjoyed nothing like the heavy artillery a 1918 offensive did, with the heaviest artillery being 240mm guns at most. By contrast the 1919 Franco-American artillery assault includes a far great proportion of heavy artillery up to 400mm in caliber, in simple stunning quantities. The inaccurate American 1944 bombing raids don't compare.
Except I've never claimed any of that and further have repeatedly stated that in other posts.
And I'll say you have, you say you haven't, this will go on until the end of time. The verdict of history as demonstrated in the 1918 battles is clear: the artillery of 1918 and 1919 as used by both the Germans and Allies was sufficient to break through any defensive line, which makes your suggestion about the impenetrable nature of Metz absurd.
Which is good, because I've never said that either. I did say they were able to effectively continue resistance over their own lines, which was the point; the Allied air advantage in 1918 was not the same as it was in 1945.
If you're admitting the Allies enjoy air superiority over the 1918 battle lines, then it doesn't matter, because they have all of the advantages that 1918 air power gives. The Allies had air superiority, the only argument you can make is that they had to pay a high price to hold it.
I'm fully aware and I'm also fully aware that the British offensive was at it's end by the time of the Armistice. That just leaves the French and Americans to bash their heads against German border defenses, and I doubt the French could sustain that for long.
Amazing how you can switch from discussing a 1919 offensive to 1918 situations with such fluidity as it suits your "argument"... By 1919 the British would be advancing with their French and American allies again.
When all you can do is strawman, it's a pretty clear sign you're unable to counter the points of the other person.
Says the guy who goes on to say this...
"The Allied Superman no no wrongs, the puny Germans will be crushed"
The difference is that I'm not the one who is claiming the Americans cannot learn from combat experience, that the Allies are unable to repair a tank, that the Allies cannot repair a railroad or road in a 6 month period, etc. When you are making claims such as these, perhaps your argument is naturally a strawman of the normal run of pro-German arguments, so absurd do they present themselves.
It would take months to fix and the tanks being produced were not conducive for the mobile warfare advocated by Fueller. Given the experience of Patton in 1944 and other American commanders in the region, I'm also doubtful of their usefulness to offensive actions in the region.
The
only person bringing up Fuller is you, failing to meet a
hypothetical operational plan of a single British officer does
not deny the massive nature of Allied tanks, and those months are months that the Entente had before a 1919 offensive commenced in earnest.
You mean his detailed plan that became the basis for armored warfare used by the major armies of the next war and into the current day? The same plan the Entente was trying to enact at the time? Do tell me. See above for the rest.
The Entente Armies in 1918 did
not base their operational strategies for their tanks on Fulton, you are presenting a red herring which is trying to deny the massive advantage in terms of tanks that the Entente held in 1918 by telling us that because they didn't meet the imagination of a single British officer, they didn't exist. Stop confronting the Allies not carrying out a
hypothetical and move back to reality, the actual numbers of tanks that the Allies had and their actual employment and usage.
You're being deliberately obtuse here as the Anglo-French squabbles in the Middle East have absolutely nothing to do with the Americans nor present an issue in the European theater because there is nothing to dispute there.
You are the one who is ignoring that there were
vast and significant conflicts of interest between the two principal Allied powers in a region which led to massive alterations in plans and constant tensions, but that these
never prevented the Entente powers from nevertheless waging a war. That it was between the Anglo-French rather than between Balkan factions and in a different theater has
nothing to do with their validity as an example of the fact that squabbles between Allies never prevented their participation in some way in the war effort. Find me an example of a conflict of interest between the Allies which resulted in one of the powers
ending their participation in the war and then you will be able to coherently claim that a dispute between Yugoslavia and Italy is sufficient to torpedo Allied Balkan plans: until then, the example of the Middle East demonstrates that when confronted by major conflict of interests, the Allies changed plans and disputed heavily among each other, but continued to engage in the war effort.
Yes they did but the entire reason they developed a unified command structure is because they realized how ineffective the previous state of affairs was and realized that to carry out the major offensives later in the year they needed a central authority to help direct and manage them.
Ok, which doesn't remove the fact that they fought previously.
You act as if existing divisions can not be detailed to do so or fresh units raised.
From the German manpower pool in 1918, the only suggestions to salvage have come from you with an idea so good that the Germans, fighting with bitterly insufficient resources for 4 years and with the survival of their nation on the line, were apparently too timid to implement, and who had themselves already sustained horrifying casualties? Yes, I doubt very much that any significant number of new divisions can be raised or old ones brought up to strength. Otherwise, if this was so easy, the Germans would not have seen their strength decline throughout their Spring Offensives and the Hundred Days.
Again, you're being obtuse; if they Anglo-French pull out their divisions, they cannot occupy any of the territory they want as they will not have forces on the ground. They have to keep those forces there, otherwise their entire Post-War plans are upended and I'd bet the Ottomans and Bulgarians would re-enter the conflict if suddenly they found themselves with no enemies to face. Since we're assuming a PoD at the end of September, the Serbians, Montenegrins and Romanians are largely a non-factor.
You are the one who is ignoring the situation: regardless if the Allies put those divisions on the Western Front or are using them to occupy territory and fight against the Germans from the South, the point is that it is now the German responsibility to engage them and not that of their Allies, when the Germans were already (in the world of reality at least....) collapsing on the one front they had. The Italians would have been the principal ones to carry out the Austro-Hungarian strategy and had plenty of troops to occupy the territory. The Romanians had already re-entered the war in November, the Serbians have 7 divisions, the Greeks exist for another force on the southern front, and with Allied industrial and financial support they are perfectly capable of occupying the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially when most of it is friendly to the Allies except Hungary and the remnant Austria sections.
And you're the one who continues to make strawmen.
Hmm.
"The Allied Superman no no wrongs, the puny Germans will be crushed"
Regardless, you are still the one who seriously suggested that the Allies would have been unable to repair their tanks in 6 months.
That's certainly my argument more or less but that is nowhere near what you were claiming and we both know it. You stated I claimed they had been winning the 100 Days, which I never have.
Look, if you want to complain about strawmen, then be consistent.
"The Allied Superman no no wrongs, the puny Germans will be crushed"
You can accuse me of strawmen because I enjoy my rhetoric, but don't turn around and do the same thing while continuing to accuse me of doing it in the very same post.
You should also note that Faustschlag was on the Northern European Plain, meaning all those pesky mountains they had to face were non-existent. Further, we're somehow expecting the Serbs and Romanians, with no real industrial base because they had just been occupied for years, to somehow sustain a massive offensive across the Pannonia Basin and thence into Germany through multiple mountain rangers with no Anglo-French support. Romania could collapse Hungary because Hungary was effectively having a civil war within it that the Romanians could get the support from one faction and, further, Hungary is right next to Romanian and in the middle of the relatively flat and open Pannonia Basin.
Faustschlag was essentially moving along the railroads, travelling from one railroad station to the next and occupying it. When there are no units to oppose an attack, then difficult terrain becomes much less of an impediment. All of the factors which applied to the Hungarian collapse apply to the reasons why it (the only faction other than Austria hostile to the Allies) would collapse just as easily in a southern offensive in 1919, and why would see Allied forces pressing up through the South in the 1919 offensive, as well as from the West. The Allies, with the American army being equipped and self-sufficient by 1919, and the British and French armies already at their maximum size, are positively swimming in supplies for their Balkan allies.
So in other words, you've conceded it wouldn't be until sometime in 1919 that the Yugoslavs and Romanians could take the offensive?
Is that not fairly obvious? The Allies will support their Balkan factiosn and wrap up the Austro-Hungarian Empire throughout the first part of 1919, not that hard when very little hostile resistance exists. Then they'll be able to synchronize their attacks with their Western Front forces as part of their 1919 offensive, which was always French strategy at least.
I'm also not sure what support you're referring to since apparently the Anglo-French are withdrawing all troops from the theater and I'm curious as to how they will be able to keep them supplied given that fact as well as how they will go about doing both that and supplying the Americans.
You're the one who constantly claims that, when there was nothing at all in my original argument concerning that: I noted that the French or British were free to use their forces as they wished and now the Germans had to counter forces equivalent to 10% of the enemies they faced on the Western Front with the collapse of their Allies. Keeping them supplied is hardly difficult since 1)French and British war production continued to climb and they had largely equipped their armies already so had plenty of spare material left over, and 2)American military production could start to make a significant contribution to the Allied total in 1919, enough so that it has to rely on Franco-British contributions much less.
"The Allied Superman no no wrongs, the puny Germans will be crushed"
Try to be consistent at least with your arguing, you can't claim me to be posing strawmen for everything I've said and then say that yourself.
Furthermore, this says nothing against the reasons why any German attempt to counter the Allied Southern advance is bankrupt before it commences.[/quote]
